cloud, iaas, paas, saas and virtualisation information

Monthly Archives: May 2012

Citrix will combine the newly-acquired Virtual Computer technology with its market-leading XenClient® hypervisor to create the new Citrix XenClient Enterprise edition. The new XenClient Enterprise will combine all the power of the XenClient hypervisor with a rich set of management functionality designed to help enterprise customers manage large fleets of corporate laptops across a distributed enterprise.

Share this:

Like this:

VMware Workstation, Player, and Server require a 64-bit CPU to run a 64-bit guest operating system.

Intel CPUs must have EM64T and VT support in the chip and in the BIOS. Intel EM64T CPUs do not have segmentation support in long mode. If the Intel EM64T CPU is VT-capable, it comes with hardware virtualization support (Intel’s Virtualization Technology). This hardware virtualization support allows VMware to work around the lack of segmentation, making it possible to run 64-bit guest operating systems on Intel EM64T VT-capable CPUs.

If the Intel site says that your CPU(s) support VT, but your VMware product says that your host does not support VT, you may have encountered an Intel chip erratum (possibly AW67, AV69, AX64, AY64, AZ69 or AAA70, depending on the CPU). The effect of this erratum is that some CPU features are reported incorrectly by the CPU. The only solution to this problem is to obtain an updated BIOS from your system vendor.

Like this:

Metal as a Service

MAAS from Canonical & Ubuntu brings the language of the cloud to physical servers. It makes it easy to set up the hardware on which to deploy any service that needs to scale up and down dynamically; a cloud being just one example.

It lets you provision your servers dynamically, just like cloud instances – only in this case, they’re whole physical nodes. “Add another node to the Hadoop cluster, and make sure it has at least 16GB RAM” is as easy as asking for it.

With a simple web interface, you can add, commission, update and recycle your servers at will. As your needs change, you can respond rapidly, by adding new nodes and dynamically re-deploying them between services. When the time comes, nodes can be retired for use outside the MAAS.

Share this:

Like this:

The good news is that the latest VMWare Player VMWare Tools (4.0.2 build-591240) now work with the Oracle Linux 5 UEK linux kernel but the bad news is that the ‘divider=’ kernel option seems to be ignored by the Oracle UEK kernel so you may need to switch back to the regular kernel if you wish to reduce the number of interrupts generated by all your Oracle Linux 5 vms !